Basically, the guidance counselor becomes your English teacher.
And this is one of those English teacher articles. This article explores the action of the sentences in the manuals-the verbs.
Verbs dictate and control action. Want to know what's happening in the sentence? Check out the verb. The verb tells you what's happening and what's going down.
And when I see my colleagues tell me the action in their verbs, I see two errors that often occur in this activity. One error is having verb tenses that do not agree. The other is having a verb go "passive."
Agreement of Tense
One of the errors I see with verbs is the disagreement of tenses. An example is the following:
After you have turned off the faucet, the water will stop running.
If we break down the sentence, we see the first clause with a past perfect tense. The second clause has a future tense.
So, why is this important? First, let's look at word count. The sentence above has 12 words. If we make the tenses consistent, and use the present tense, we get the following:
When you turn off the faucet, the water stops.
That's nine words. You have cut the word count 25%. Is this important? It is when you need to translate the manual and are charged by the word (which can be anywhere from 20 to 30 cents a word, depending on language).
The optimal tense is the present tense. This makes the action more immediate to the reader. It also keeps word counts down. Look at the following as an example:
Past perfect: Have turned off, have stopped
Past: turned off, stopped
Present: turn off, stops
Future: Will turn off, will stop
Future Perfect: Will have turned off, will have stopped
Keep an Active Verb
Another problem I run into is the use of passive voice. Now, I may need to explain the difference here. Basically, the voice relates the relationship of the subject to the action of the verb. If the subject does the action of the verb, the verb is said to have an "active" voice. If the action is being done to the subject, the verb is said to have a "passive" voice. Let me illustrate with this example:
Active: The boy kicked the ball.
Passive: The ball was kicked by the boy.
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